by Larry Niven
“Log on with your credit ident. Doctors get priority.”
Up three floors. Lines of office doors along a corridor, all labeled, all closed. At the end of the hall, an open door.
LIBRARY
He found a dozen comfortable chairs and five screens. One wasn't working. Four were in use. One user looked wasted: his eyes had a glassy look. Patient. Three looked healthy and busy: doctors.
Jeremy sat down and waited placidly. He'd waited twenty-seven years.
The patient nodded off; rapped his forehead on the keyboard, jerked up to see gibberish. Staggered upright and went away.
Jeremy took his place. As his fingertips touched the keyboard, Jeremy's eyes stung with tears, abruptly, unexpectedly. The home he'd lost again and again was his at last. He was back in Spiral Town, eight years old again, and it was time for school.
All right. There were things he'd always wondered about. The teaching programs never had enough to satisfy him.
CRAB
There were hundreds of Earthlife varieties. Jeremy could pick one or two that resembled the Crab Peninsula.
OTTER
Earthlife: a mammal, streamlined, with bristly hair. It looked nothing at all like Otterfolk.
OTTE RFOLK
Kismet tegumentum lutrahomines, the first intelligent species ever found off Earth. Otterfolk were curious about humans.
Cavorite's crew loved that. They ran their Road well above Otterfolk beaches for fear that those who came after would meddle. Jeremy found references to species gone extinct because they attracted human attention. But they'd done some meddling themselves.
They'd taught the Otterfolk how to cultivate Earthlife fish and crustacea, and traded them simple tools for fish. That was a success.
They'd set up a cooperative exploring team.
Reference:
OTTERFOLK*EXPLORE*CLIFF SIDE
OTTERFOLK*EXPLORE*BEACHE S
The Otterfolle enjoy boat rides. We want to try a mixed crew. Arundez has designed a suitable boat, a catamaran with nets we can drop to b10~k off the central well so that otterfolk can swim during a voyage...
They'd gone exploring together, along the coast and off the back side of the Crab, above and beneath the sea.
Destiny sunlight, reddened and deficient in ultraviolet, still caused skin cancers and blindness in Otterfolk.
Sea life outside Haunted Bay poisoned them. Or attacked them: there were predators worse than lungsharks.
In unfamiliar currents they followed the wrong smells and got lost.
Lower salinity hurt their skins and made them vulnerable to parasites.
To avoid bringing back a nasty skin parasite, the contact crew had euthanized ten Otterfolk and burned the boat.
EUTHANIZE
Kill.
It bothered Jeremy, but the Biology crew had been horrified. Not just the guilt, not just the deaths. An intelligent species that couldn't explore! To men and women who had conquered space- And seen space ripped from their grasp- That was obscene.
He flinched from the next entry- KAREN WINSLOW
Patient records are restricted. Access code?
-relaxed, and tried- ARGOS
Familiar stuff.
Half a thousand colonists had left Sol system in cold sleep, with twenty crew.
Cold-sleep techniques were two hundred years advanced beyond Avalon's time, but the major advances were diagnostic. Colonists damaged by cranial ice crystals would be, ah, euthanized. A crew member wakened during the voyage must remain thawed.
Far too many were damaged. Three hundred and sixty-six sleepers arrived, and seventy crew. Fifty sleepers chosen for skills learned in deep space had been revived to deal with an emergency.
Most of the fifty had lived their lives off Earth. They'd grown up using the resources of an entire solar system. They had flown Argos across light-years to a system yet untouched. Asteroid and gas-giant mining techniques were centuries old. Their faith was in Argos and their own skills.
They'd expected the colony on Destiny to fail. Destiny's ecology, after all, would have its own agenda.
On arrival, they mutinied.
ARGO S*MUTINY*TRIAL
The facts weren't in dispute. A trial hadn't struck him as silly when he was a boy. Base One's tribunal had found them guilty, and so what? By then the mutineers were elsewhere in the solar system. Their judges were marooned, owning two landers and whatever gear had been judged useless by an exoplanetaiy community. They were barely able to reach orbit.
ARGOS*DEBRIEF
He'd been through these too: memoirs by crew who chose to remain with the Destiny colony. Wait, these files had more bulk than Base One's memoirs. It must include material written after Cavorite's departure. Try
ARGOS*MEMOIR5:TWERDAHL
Restricted material. Access code? No birdfucking allowed.
ARGOS*SIGHTINGS
Ye gods! Destiny Town had an orbiting telescope!
The Cyclops telescope had gone up a hundred and ninety-one years ago. First sighting of Argos came ten years later; first verified sighting, eleven years. Argos's drive flame was not bright; Argos without it was invisible. But the Argos drive flame impacting an asteroid was brilliant and unmistakable... for whatever that was worth. Destiny Town could only watch. Cavorite could reach geosynchronous orbit, but not the moons, not the planets, not the stars.
Cyclops telescope watched Argos establishing a base on the dumbbell-shaped asteroid called Blake, and verified that Argos had kept faith by this much: they had seeded Quicksilver with a photocollector factory.
QUICKSILVER*SUNPOWER
In 2689, approaching two centuries after its emplacement, that first little self-reproducing factory had multiplied enough to be noticed. A bright patch was visible on the innermost planet, and a trickle of power was flowing to Destiny.
Power was also being directed toward Argos.
Today-2739-Quicksilver's sunward face was covered in silver. Along the Crab they never knew it had been different. But power flow toward Argos could no longer be detected.
Jeremy kept returning to the blueprints for the self-reproducing factory. Shape of a turtle, mass of a man, size of a small boy. There was a name for such things: what was it? A factory that could be directed to make more of itself.
Von Neumann device.
Argos's mutineers had no faith in the planetary colony. Time might have justified that to their descendants. The colony on Destiny had done little in a quarter of a millennium. Wait, hadn't he seen a file- ARGOS*SIGHTINGS
Yes. The last sighting of Argos in flight was in 2680, fifty-nine years ago. And the flow of power from Quicksilver had stopped.
Did Argos's crew still have descendants?
SPECKLES (FATUM VENTUSI HERBAAE)
The list of entries ran on and on. What on Earth was
SPECKLES, see also Fatum mortem parnelli FATUM MORTEM PARNELLI
Destiny krill is a multicelled microscopic life-form that uses photosynthesis, but swims free.
E~en on Earth there were organisms that crossed the line between plant and animal.
F. mortem parnelli lives in every part 0f the ocean thus far explored. It is clearly 0f the speckles family (Fatum ventusi herbaae), though speckles is entirely a plant.
May one speculate? Future archeologists will find the f055~l record of a krill eater-one pictures a Destiny blue whale with shell and shellcap- that plowed th~5 world's seas until M. parnelli learned to secrete deadly metals. The krill poisoned them to extinction. Later a Mortem variation evolved on land.
The crucial point here is that Destiny lzrill secretes potassium. When it dies it sinks to the bottom 0f the sea. There the potassium remains. After billions 0f years 0f that, we find no potassium in Destiny sea salt, and that is ~ we will die.
-Wayne Parnelli, Marine Biology
Fatum mortem, he'd called it. Destiny's death. Scared the hell of out him, did it?
Jeremy had wondered... every child wondered... why A rgos came to Dest
iny without the means to keep settlers alive. How could the ancient wizards of Sol system have been so stupid? But if oceans on Earth had all the potassium they needed...
Jeremy almost laughed. That must have been a nasty shock.
Look up speckles, but there were so many files. Be selective. Search:
SPECKLE S*FARM
A line of sporadic volcanoes four hundred klicks long. Tornadoes. Metals... potassium refining... speckles... thorn trees and thorn weeds, ground-hugging animals and windbirds, a varied and intricate ecology evolved within the Winds, each new species needing classification and further study.
And:If speckles can be farmed elsewhere, we must ~t~l1 extract potassium to feed it. Why bother? We'll grow it here.
Cavorite's course matched his guesses, but what had Brenda meant? They did more than that. More than refine potassium, then discover and cultivate speckles, in an endless howling storm full of thorn birds? Then race home...
SPECKLES*TWERDAHL*BASE ONE
He read on, while afternoon darkened to evening.
Base One had delayed Cavorite's departure, had afflicted them with a long list of projects, had repeatedly tried to cancel the expedition. The first settlers had not perceived any need for haste.
A nasty shock, as Jeremy had guessed, following the nasty shock of Argos's betrayal. Base One was in denial.
But, though sea salt would not sustain Base One, Earthlife animals made nerves too. They were good at secreting potassium. Ancient kings had learned to confiscate manure piles at the first sign of war, for nuggets of saltpeter to grind up for gunpowder. But saltpeter-potassium nitrate-could also be ground into food.
So Cavorite drifted down the coast at a snail's pace, leaving a snail's trail of molten rock. They would fulfill all of their mission: seed Earthlife wherever they went, pause to sample local life, look for places a village might thrive, investigate signs of what might be intelligence. Let the ungrateful bastards wait and wonder. Cavorite's crew could take their time.
In due time Cavorite returned to Base One emptied of Earthlife seeds and infant animals, and loaded with samples of rock and Destiny life, maps, refined potassium and speckles.
What had gone wrong at Base One?
They found plumbing redirected to sterilize sewage with heat, then vent it above croplands. That would have done the job, if the job had been more than ten percent finished! Maybe they were stopped by the stench.
Livestock implied manure. Manure had even been raked into heaps, but the heaps lay untouched. Nobody had picked through them for saltpeter. Then again, there wasn't much. Potassium must first be put into fertilizer to feed the grass! Grass didn't make nerves.
As their intelligence dropped, had they forgotten what was at stake? Cavorite's crew might speculate, but there was nobody to ask. There were nobody at Base One who could still talk coherently.
The records that followed were nearly incoherent with medical jargon. Here Jeremy sensed a rage shared but never expressed. Twerdahl's crew had fed and washed and dressed their former colleagues, dressed the sores and treated the illnesses caused by dirt and randomly deposited sewage, and cleaned up after them until they grew to detest them.
Jeremy found reference to discipline problems, and murky speculation as to what constitutes rape and consent, theft versus custody, rnurder versus euthanasia, for people who had ceased to be people.
This wasn 'tin the teaching tapes at Spiral Town! But Barda Winslow had tried to tell him.
Some of the sick ones recovered some of their intelligence, some of their memory. Not all. Central-nervous-system nerves, once dead, don't grow back.
Cavorite's crew came to realize that they had become the primary colony on Destiny.
They founded Terminus far enough outside the Winds to escape the continual howling- “Move it,” someone said. Before he could react, someone was handing
Jeremy his crutches and lifting him to his feet. “Set?”
“Ah-“ Wait, I want to look up- The man sat down. A doctor. He erased Jeremy's file and called up something else.
-Caravans!
If Jeremy's sudden rage showed through, the doctor hadn't seen it. Jeremy was on crutches and still getting his balance, and that was as well. He had time to visit Karen before he saw Rita Nogales.
Karen was awake but a bit fuddled. He tried to tell her what he'd learned about speckles, Cavorite, Argos, the Windfarrn, Destiny Town. She listened. She tried to comfort him, as if he'd suffered a personal injury. Presently she fell asleep.
“Looks good,” Nogales said, turning the luminous interior of a human knee before her eyes. “A doctor like Itchy Wald does a neater job, but he spends too much time probing around in the joint. Trauma. Brendan is brisk. So, stay on crutches and don't do much walking for another day, then maybe we'll take the cast off.”
“Would you look in on Karen before you go?”
“Sure.”
He started to stand. “I should catch a bus-“
She said, “Wait, wait, wait. You owe me a story.”
He sat down. “You owe me, I think. Andrew was going to use the prole gun on you all.”
“No birdfucking allowed' I knew that speckles-shy birdfucker-”
“It's the law-''
“Go on.”
“I was expecting it, Rita. He turned around and I yelled and jumped him. The rest piled on. Of course he tried to kill me later....” He told hermore than he'd told Brenda, but again he left out the speckles. I did it, I made them into a restaurant before I had to leave, and now I knew how!”
Running from the Swan, Jemmy Bloocher might have begged a ride from the inbound caravan. Go to Destiny Town, the end of the Road, Cavorite. In the instant that was possible, he'd remembered what the Windfarmers had called him.
Crab shy. A stranger in a place where he didn't understand the rules. He'd done that before. And generally messed it up.
He'd gone outbound instead.
From Barda's description he'd had no trouble finding Wave Rider. “All I had to do was get Harold Winslow to give me a chance.”
“The daughter?”
“Karen? She was two months pregnant when I got there. She never told me who. Maybe I've served him dinner. Maybe not. Turnover's high in the caravans, or he might be from the spaceport. Rita, are you thinking I targeted the innkeeper's daughter?”
“Didn't you?''
“No no no. I only wanted to make myself a pit chef. I wasn't staying. And Barda didn't know Harlow. She worried me. Karen was just the little sister. Then we, I started noticing her, we started talking while she was pregnant with Mustafa.”
“Tell me about her. She's my patient too. I can tell by her skih, she gets a lot more sunlight than most human beings.”
“Karen was the one who talked to the Otterfolk before I came. She swims, and Wave Rider has a pier; she didn't have to bull her way through the waves. She gave birth in the water. Later I taught her to surf.”
“But Otterfolk don't talk, do they?”
“Karen taught me to read their dance. That's her word, dance.” He talked about Karen and himself. He was never boss at Wave Rider. He never owned any part of the restaurant. Any investment was emotional. Karen had never demanded that he show ambition.
“She has you by the balls.”
“They're still there.”
“Show me.”
He shied off. Rita laughed.
He'd stayed nearly faithful. Pressed, he admitted four affairs in those twenty-seven years. As for Karen, he was sure only of a wagonmaster who may have been Mustafa's father. He was an old man now, and Mustafa flew the orbital shuttles.
“Yeah, you weren't staying. Twenty-seven years?”
He didn't laugh.
She said, “I'm a real doctor now, a surgeon. It's what Dolores wanted to be. When she, when that birdfucker-“
“Dolores had empathy.”
“She couldn't stand to cut a person open. For me that's the easy part. Wanting to fix something broken, that'
s easy too. Jeremy, if Medical knew I was in the Windfarm, they might ease me out. Might not.”
“I'd be in worse trouble than you.” They'd kill me, he didn't say. Reassure her, yes, but he didn't want Rita Nogales thinking in terms of extortion.
“Well, I'll go look in on her. Anything else you want,” she shrugged and didn't finish.
He found Harlow, Lloyd, and Brenda waiting in Reception to take him to dinner.
30
Hydraulic Empire
We have to stop meeting in Cargo/Rec. It's gotten too small. The grandchildren are growing up.
-Anonymous
Cavorite was just across the Road.
Jeremy stood rapt, until he realized that they were trying to help him sit down on a bench. Lloyd said, “We'll get a bus pretty soon.”
“It's only eight blocks? Let's try it.” Jeremy turned away and began his swinging progress. Crutches then foot. Crutches, foot.
Harlow said dubiously, “If it starts to hurt-”
“What's it like?” Jeremy asked.
“Cavorite?”
“Yes.”
“Two stories tall, and you bump your head a lot, Daddy. Everything's near the base,” Brenda said. “Rooms, cargo, motors and pumps and cooling, even the system that makes fuel and air. Everything that has any mass. The upper part is all hydrogen tank.”
“They build the new shuttles the same,” Harlow said.
''I know.”
You want every part of a spacecraft as light as you can make it, see? Tanks you can make into frothy-walled balloons. Motors, you can't lighten those much ~f you want to run them afew hundred times, and motors have to be at the aft end. Now, the cargo, one trip you leave it in orbit, the next you're bringing it back for repair. You never know where your center of mass will becoming home, so you don't know how the shz~ willfly unless you put the cargo hold where the motors are. Now most of your mass is at the tail. It's going to fly butt first coming back, so you beef up the tail against reentry, and you might as well pile all the rest of the mass there too.
“Mustafa had a test coming up,” Jeremy said. “We all had to hear him lecture.”